I'm a nerdy Mormon.

Okay. My mom thinks this is abominable, but sometimes I cook meat with alcohol. I have maybe three recipes that call for some alcohol, but in all of them, the alcohol is mixed with other stuff and then cooking for several hours with the meat. I always feel really, really weird buying alcohol, but it makes the meat sooo tender and yummy. So I just go with it. And then if I have surplus, I dump it down the drain.

This one recipe I have calls for 12 ounces of brandy. I guess they don't sell brandy at the grocery store (I know that you can buy some types of alcohol at the store, but not others, and I don't know why. That's how much I don't know about alcohol), so the one time a year I use this recipe for pork ribs, I have to go to the liquor store.

I headed over on Saturday. It was hilarious. I walked in, with my big pregnant belly, and all the people in there stopped and stared. I think they were thinking, "What is a pregnant lady doing buying liquor??" You know, the whole Fetal Alcohol Syndrome thing. I felt really dumb. I hurried and grabbed the cheapest thing under the "Brandy" heading and walked up to the register. I could still feel all of these eyes on me. As the lady was ringing me up, I said, conversationally (and loudly), "Yep, just cooking up some ribs!!!" I hoped that the staring people heard me. The lady stuck the brandy into a brown paper bag, which had this sentence in bold on it: "DRINK RESPONSIBLY. DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE." Nice.

Then it was time to head out the door. Again, I felt really sheepish, because the dollar theater is right next door to the liquor store, and I thought, "What if someone sees me? What will they think??" So I peeked out the door before I left, looking left and right, like someone stepping out into traffic, to make sure nobody I knew was out in the parking lot.

I hopped in my car and headed over to the office to get some hours in. As I pulled into the parking lot there, I saw a couple of coworkers' cars. And then a new terror struck me. I was going to leave the brandy in the car; what if one of my coworkers saw my brown bag? The "DRINK RESPONSIBLY" bag? I saw an old McDonald's bag on the floor of the car (Ben drives that car during the day - he is awful about cleaning up his garbage) and discovered my solution. I stuck the brandy with the brown bag still on it into the McDonald's bag. Successfully camoflauged.

I'm like the Ethan Hunt of brandy. The pork ribs are cooked. The brandy bottle is in the dumpster in my alley. Mission accomplished.

(And I've only had one bite of the ribs. I'm just not into meat when I'm preggars. Ben adores them, though.)